A big part of our current thinking is shaped by our academic education. Most of us were educated to get our facts straight to be sure we do not make errors. This is not helpful. It’s harmful. The hyper vigilance locks us into a rigid mode of awareness.

And to fear punishment when we do, bringing on anxiety and fear of failure. It can stop you from acting. Recent research shows that the brain learns things better and retains them more naturally when we first try it and make errors. It gives us the experience that lets us focus on the parts of the experience that are vital for us to be aware of, but we never do this in the conventional model.

We function at our best when we just act on our awareness of what we intend to do and adjust while we are doing it. The effort to be error free prevents us from keeping that awareness of what we intend to do, or make selective judgments that remain focused on achieving our goals. While we are trying to avoid old errors that have nothing to do with what we are doing now, or trying to avoid making mistakes that “might” happen, we are trying to function in what amounts to a self generated delusion.

Whatever it is that you did wrong in the past, you can’t fix it until you know how. And by the time you know how, the problem may not surface at all, or if it does surface it doesn’t occur to you in the same way. So no amount of trying to remember it and avoid it makes you any more able to solve the problem.

Resentment is a broken translation of animal instinct by a even more spotty capacity for reason.

So part of it is we try really hard to fix things with our conscious mind, but that makes us ignore where real progress and real problems are. Exactly.

There is another way the inner rabbit mind can behave. Just like a dog or cat it can be taught to perform actions without understanding why it is doing them, and when it does this, it does do it faster and without the confusion the thinking mind experiences. This part of our mind was never the problem in the first place anyway. But the same reason it went wrong is the reason most of us fail to use it positively in the first place. We disrespect our senses and the only means we have for really understanding our senses. This facility to make sense of the senses is called imagination and its impact is very real. Just for most people it’s also very toxic. We don’t resent real things. We don’t resent that last week we were rained on. This is just accepted as experience even if we didn’t like being rained on.

We resent the worst case scenarios we dream up in our heads? Yes. We resent things as we imagine they happened or as we imagine they might happen. When they actually are happening our attentions are too involved in the moment to resent anything.

Some people resent physical discomforts, but I find I only resent things done to me by humans. So I try to think of humans as another force of nature. That’s a better model than most. And like the sea, if you learn to sail and navigate, you can get where you are going without drowning.